The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Extremely latency sensitive applications, such as teleprotection and Wide-Area Monitoring Protection and Control (WAMPAC) systems are commonly used by commercial or municipal power utilities to protect primary substation equipment based on measurements of current differential between Intelligent Electrical Devices (IEDs) connected to power lines, or between feeder lines. Synchronous communication between pairs of electrical protection relays is used to communicate real-time current measurements to detect faults in the line, as indicated by a loss of power. Because current on power lines alternates, measurements must be time synchronized between relays in different substations. Therefore, the communications network between the relays is extremely sensitive to delay and jitter.
Teleprotection systems are being deployed today on a variety of packet-based network topologies, including Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) packet networks using traditional modalities, such as Multiprotocol Label Switching-Transport Profile (MPLS-TP), Multiprotocol Label Switching-Traffic Engineering (MPLS-TE), and Flex Virtual Private Network (FlexVPN). These solutions meet some of the needs of teleprotection but do not meet all the needs. Further, the solutions are difficult to design, deploy, troubleshoot, and otherwise use. Improved solutions for teleprotection systems over packet networks are needed.